Wednesday, August 10, 2011

What Grows Around a Community Garden

Well established community gardens are amazing, especially ones that have been around for years. As each new crop of gardeners go to plant their goods what happens is they typically find seeds and perennial crops from the person before. Unwanted plants seem to have been transplanted to the outskirts along the garden. And over the years a couple of species in particular seem to have flourished here.

There are hedges of cup plant, prairie coneflower, what I'm guessing is fennel in flower, a yellow flowering yarrow, and they had the most amazing sunflowers I've ever seen. It's like someone loved the color yellow and planted everything they could get to grow 5' or taller.  

Most of this is one sunflower! The one stem was about 6" thick and had branches coming out of each node, where the leaves are formed. There were leaves on the lower ones at one point but they slowly die off over the year. So this massive sunflower had branches of other sunflowers coming out of it. It's amazing to think earlier in the year this was just a 1cm seed. 

There weren't as many bees flying around as you might think. There were lots of bumblebees around but nothing I hadn't seen before. 

There were a bunch of goldfinches flying around too but they were doing their best to dodge me at every turn.

I'm actually not doing this place justice because they were growing lots of other goodies, like Corn and just about everything else someone can grow.